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Denver Seminary has a wealth of resources that are available to current students, alumni, and the local community. Here you will find access to the Denver Journal, Engage Magazine, and the various initiatives organized by the Seminary.

Want to learn more about our academic degree programs? Take a look at our Master of Divinity, Master of Arts, and Doctor of Ministry programs. Plus, learn about our unique Training & Mentoring program.

This Student Life section is the one-stop shop for students to get connected to activities that will feed your spiritual and social life as well as equip you with resources to jump-start your academic career.

Being a part of our Denver Seminary community is about connection. Whether you are an alumni, donor, or friend of the Seminary, we want to stay in touch and hope you'll take part in our programs and events.

Denver Seminary has a wealth of resources that are available to current students, alumni, and the local community. Here you will find access to the Denver Journal, Engage Magazine, and the various initiatives organized by the Seminary.

Terry Cooper, a professor of psychology at St. Louis Community
College, has produced a commendable analysis of a nagging problem for
all who work at integrating theology and psychology: Is pride at the
core of the human dilemma or is it a lack of self-esteem? Cooper works
with material from Augustine and Reinhold Niebuhr to illustrate the
case for pride and from Pelagius and Carl Rogers to make the case for a
lack of self-esteem. Linking a heretic with one side of the debate
would seem unfair and akin to a "stacked deck," but Cooper is careful
not to abuse Pelagian thought at this point in his book. Cooper selects
these four thinkers as key representatives of the age-old debate
because Augustine and Pelagius represent an important phase in the
development of Christian thought and because Niebuhr and Rogers have
exerted powerful influences on Twentieth Century theology and
psychology.

Cooper supplements his argument with material from Gerald May
illustrating Augustine's contention that pride and concupiscence are
linked; May's theory of addiction is useful in this regard. The author
also shows how feminist critiques have revealed some inadequacies in
Niebuhr's viewpoint regarding how pride serves as a core sin. The
expression of sin, the critics argue, is different for men and for
women. Cooper finds the work of psychoanalyst Karen Horney particularly
useful in arguing that the question at the heart of this book is not an
either-or question but a both-and issue. Cooper is not merely striving
to create an artificial compromise to the problem. He genuinely sees
the core human issue as containing elements of both problems. "One may
be dominant, but the other does not lie far behind. Thus, there is
unexpected low self-esteem in pride and unexpected pride in low
self-esteem" (p. 165). The final chapter is worth the price of the
book. In it Cooper summarizes his arguments in a succinct and helpful
manner.

Cooper makes a very interesting point regarding this matter of
original sin, a matter "rooted in a historical-causal explanation" (p.
42). As more and more Christians move away from belief in the
historicity of the Adam and Eve accounts toward some type of divinely
directed evolutionary process, the biblical account of a pre-fallen
Eden and of the Fall itself becomes more and more unlikely. How then
will these Christians build a theology of original sin?

The problems of the book are few in number. Some readers will cringe
at the way responsible authors are lumped together with irresponsible
popularizers whom none in the field take very seriously (i. e. John
Bradshaw). And there are some ways in which the book is dated. Niebuhr
and Rogers are both important figures in our recent past. And no one
would argue that we need to catch up with their work so that we
understand it fully as it compares to Christian tradition and to the
Word of God. But we are now in the Twenty-First Century, and we are
facing even greater challenges from postmodern thinkers. Now the very
concept of a core self is under attack as well as the idea that we can
build theories that have boundaries. One hopes it doesn't take us
another 50 years to figure out what are the many implications of these
current and pressing contentions.

The author cites five critics of the self-esteem movement. Each of
them contributes a cogent critique to the issue (Paul Vitz, David
Myers, Christopher Lasch, Edwin Schur, and Martin Gross). It is
important for readers, however, to keep the number of five in
perspective. Does it compare to thousands of authors who use the
concept of self-esteem responsibly? Or are there just five such
persons? Five critics do not necessarily destroy the movement. Their
ideas need to be compared to those of responsible advocates of healthy
self-esteem who have been able to avoid the extremes characteristic of
pop psychology.

As an interested reader of this book, I came away with several
impressions. First, this issue is so vast in its implications that one
can easily feel overwhelmed by all the factors that merit our
attention. The matter is confusing as well. Second, I was struck with
how these theological debates sometimes wander away from giving central
consideration to the biblical texts involved. Is Augustine correct when
he argued that pride motivated the first couple to sin? The text says
they made their decision to eat of the forbidden fruit because they saw
that it was good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and a tree that could
make one wise. Perhaps pride is here, perhaps it is not. And for the
alleged result of the Fall, that humans put a prideful self at the
center of their lives in place of God, do we see such an eventuality in
the Genesis text? Do Adam and Eve comically attempting to hide from the
presence of God by crouching behind the trunk of a tree look like
prideful people who have made self their god? Can we envision them as
towering in inflated self- esteem or cowering in deflated self-esteem?
They look like disobedient people who are frightened of the
consequences they know are soon to come. The text suggests the first
sin involved disobedience, perhaps based in disbelief in God's
statement that eating of the fruit of that tree would be bad. No one
would argue that pride later entered the picture, but is it the
starting point of the sinful process or an endpoint?

Perhaps we have taken the serpent's tempting line too seriously. He
did taunt them with the possibility that they would be like God (Gen.
3:5). We are not told, however, if this tempting line was the motive
Eve and Adam had for their disobedience. We see pride clearly in
passages often thought reflective of the fall of Satan from heaven
(John 8:44; Ezekiel 28; Isaiah 14), but we must be careful not to
confuse Satan's Fall with the Fall of the human race.

I also wonder if it is helpful to pose the question of Augustine
next to the question of modern psychotherapy (at least as represented
by Carl Rogers). Perhaps the two are asking different questions which
would explain why they give different answers. Theologians are
interested in identifying what is at the heart of human separation from
God. Psychotherapists seek to determine what is at the core of our
clients' pathology. (One could substitute any politically-correct term
here as desired: problems in living, angst, maladjustment,
distress, abnormality, and so forth). The answer to the question of the
theologians should be "sin. " And the answer to the psychotherapist's
question should be related to some overall theory about the development
of psychopathology. Low self-esteem is but one answer. Other answers
include anxiety, alienation, faulty learning, erroneous thinking, poor
and inadequate parenting, and on and on.

This book will stimulate your thinking and reflection. It is a must for those engaged in the integration enterprise.